The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of the Robotic Process Automation
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a growing and evolving topic since the past few years. Many organizations are investing considerable amount of time and resources in order to automate repetitive and potentially repetitive tasks to maximize their earnings, adapt faster to the constantly evolving markets, predict new opportunities and reinvest their resources in new research for keeping their businesses succeeding and expanding.
Usually, the first impression of the RPAs is love at first sight because your new virtual employees are going to work 24/7/365 without any bonus or breaks! Managers and CEOs visualize massive earnings and how many FTEs (Full Time Employees) are going to be saved per quarter; however, as love at first sight, it could be tricky and potentially lead to many disappointments and terrible divorces. The RPAs can be similar and you might finish in love-hate relationships because no one went deeper to understand each other and in some cases a massive lost of money, trust, time and resources.
Based on my last two years of designing and developing robots; I have been able to identify the Good, the Bad and potentially, the Ugly parts of implementing the RPAs and I'd like to share you my thoughts and help you level up your opportunities in this emerging market.
The Good
The Good Parts of the RPAs happen when they are properly implemented because they become real Change Agents in the organizations and are capable of creating disruptive innovations as forging better relations with the employees, clients and employers.
This is a fifty-fifty chance in my experience because most of the time, they need additional work to extend the honeymoon as long as possible in order to create the ideal and stable marriages. From my perspective, I have identified the following opportunities that are considerably important to all companies and employees.
1. Minimizing repetitive tasks.
How many times have you performed repetitive tasks at work?
I'm sure you perform them all the time and you're tired!
This is the main target of the RPAs since neither corporations nor employees want to repeat the same task again and again and again; this situation creates considerable amount of stress, loss of money, resources, energy, etc.
The RPAs as I expressed before are seen as virtual employees since they can work 24/7/365 without food, water or asking increments in their salaries! They can take care of these tedious tasks that no one wants to do, help companies standardize their processes and minimize human errors.
There are mainly two kinds of robots, the ones that work by themselves (unattended robots) and the others that collaborate with employees to LEVEL them UP (attended robots), which one is better, it depends on the case.
2. Increasing earnings.
This is one of the crucial parts of implementing the RPAs since companies are capable of increasing their revenues by reducing their FTEs to the minimum, reducing human errors, providing faster answers and better communication with their clients, etc.
On the other hand, properly re-skilled employees can become real deal breakers since they will move to new, more creative and intellectual positions where they would put into practice their previous and new knowledge (Power BI, Data Analysis, etc.) since all these manual tasks (typing thousands of lines in Excel, for instance) would be automated; these new opportunities would be more intellectual, which tend to be better paid (1).
3. New job opportunities.
After companies have properly implemented the RPAs and refocused their efforts in their core businesses, new jobs would come as compensation of the previous positions, for example, AI business development manager, Cyber city analyst, Quantum machine-learning analyst, among many others (2).
The RPAs can be seen as kinds of tiny BPOs inside of the organizations since they take care of these tasks that could have been delegated to 3rd party companies from the comfort of their own home and the company can focus one more time in their core businesses.
The Bad
The Bad Parts of the RPAs are mostly connected to inexperienced or assigning improper employees to administrate or create the robots.
Some time ago, I received a job offer from a recruiter who needed an RPA developer. Unfortunately, he was unaware of what the developer role is (3). The offer was approximately the following one:
I have a new position in Cracow, one of the best ones in the Polish market for RPAs where my client, a Swiss bank is looking forward to an RPA developer who has amazing soft-skills and is super skillful in programming to identify potential automation opportunities and innovations, share knowledge, interact with clients, program in Automation Anywhere, VB.NET, C#, VBA, SQL Server, ASP.NET, JavaScript, etc.
The offer was for an entry level and you rarely have the best of both worlds. Generally, developers only follow specific tasks and hardly ever interact with the clients for various reasons (4).
Returning to the bad parts, I have been able to identify three specific scenarios where the RPAs became toxic relationships and the ending of the honeymoons … Well, they finished in abrupt divorces. These cases are the following ones:
1. Treat the RPAs as they don't need any programming skill.
This is the most common misconception, but relatively easy to tackle.
Many RPA sellers sell their solutions as non-programming tools; you just need to configure them once, minimal infrastructure changes and they would start mimicking all actions from your screen and in a blink of an eye, they begin to work like magic!
Unfortunately, it's false, to be frank, I'd really love that it will be like that and have these kinds of magical tools since it will simplify all my extra-work! But let's be serious, in order to properly build a robot, you need to have programming logic (5), understand the processes and business cases, add exceptions, create proper documentation, record users actions, etc.
No RPA solution is capable of auto-predicting human behaviors without any support and sooner or later, new manual adjustments are going to come and they can only be done by programmers and at this point of time (March 2019), the RPAs cannot auto-add these exceptions by themselves; specially, if the exceptions are uncommon or poorly documented. For example, a drastic UI change of the login page (Figure 1).
Figure 1. First Facebook Login (2004) vs Current Facebook Login (Mar 2019).
The Figure 1 can be easily understood by a human while in an RPA, UiPath AI Computer Vision could potentially do the trick (since Feb 2019), but it involves extra-steps and modifications to the robot. Also, a similar feature isn't necessary available in other RPA solutions.
2. Believe that RPA projects are typical Software development projects.
This is the second most common scenario and the most complex to solve.
Many organizations including the ones that have their own IT departments make this mistake easily and frequently. They send all their managers and programmers to learn about UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, etc. The teams get all certificates available in the market, but when the moments of truth happen … There are delays and delays and delays, no proper understanding of the tools, lack of effective communication, clueless of the business cases, etc.
The RPA projects (as explained in the Business Analyst Training of UiPath) are slightly different and can be simplified as follows based on in my experience.
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In the typical software development (commercial not scientific computing or low level), you interact with a couple of software at the same time, for example, Chrome for displaying a webpage (result) and Visual Studio (development tool) for programming it. There could be multiple variations that includes databases, clouds, etc.
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On the other hand, in the RPAs, there is an interaction among multiple apps at once, from various sources and reasons that you can/cannot control or modify. Some of these apps can be: SAP, Excel, Sharepoint, Sage, MySQL, Single Point Solutions, macros, internal websites (IE Only), UiPath Studio (development tool), UiPath Robot (tasks runner), UiPath Orchestrator (admin and tasks scheduler), among others.
Furthermore, I have experienced and heard stories from multiple organizations where the RPAs were introduced and some of their senior managers led these projects mostly with mixed results.
Despite they were vastly theoretically trained and had multiple RPA certifications, they didn't have any practical experience or understand properly their capabilities and limitations and weren't very open to listen any advice. These situations created a concrete risk:
They still treated the RPAs as typical software development projects.
The management and the work became stressful and ineffective, rarely reaching deadlines because they closed their minds and didn't want to see how they differ, adopt new techniques (6) or best practices (7) or identify potential employees who might be interested in the technologies and ultimately, they pressured their programmers to move to the RPAs to reach their targets at any cost.
Re-skilling and awareness in this emerging market are the key points and both sides, managers and developers need to understand their new roles since the projects are similar, but as my brother always says:
"Similar is not the same" (Parecido no es igual). Rodrigo Navarrete
3. Think that all processes are suitable for the RPAs.
This one was explained deeper in my previous article (8), but I'll recap a bit.
Lack of proper understanding of the capabilities of the RPAs or processes can create challenging situations because not all processes are suitable for the RPAs even if you could automate an extremely complex solution from SAP with UiPath, it doesn't mean it's the best or optimal solution. For example, UiPath, which is quite efficient with SAP processing suggests: "To enable SAP Scripting for the best results".
The previous situation won't be highly efficient at this point in time and it's more prone to errors than using a VBA Macro, which will be stable, reliable, faster and effective in the long-term.
If you actually needed to enable SAP Scripting for the best results, you could also record the script in SAP, edit and run it flawlessly since the code was even provided by the provider itself.
The Ugly
The Ugly Parts of the RPAs are connected to deeper changes that could affect societies and workplaces. They are mostly theoretical cases from my personal experience and background, but they can happen if there is no proper awareness and re-skilling of the workplaces. When the RPAs are implemented without proper re-skilling, you will often face similar questions to this one:
What would you do if an old lady refuses to give you her knowledge because she'll become jobless?
I got that question in a job interview in 2018. Such cases frequently happen when improper RPA implantations took place and the employees became reluctant to collaborate with their employers and in some cases they just quit the companies and kept their knowledge for themselves. As a Salvadoran I was able to identify some drastic cases that might happen if these tools were brought in an unsuitable way (mostly to emerging or developing countries) and are the following ones:
1. Greater gap between the rich and poor.
If the workers are only released from their current jobs without any opportunities or new knowledge, this situation will lead to massive differences as used to be 200 years ago between nobles and peasants (Chart 1).
Chart 1. World population living in extreme poverty, 1820-2015 (9).
2. Increasing informal employment.
Since people wouldn't have formal choices due to the digital skills gap (10), these technologies could affect them drastically and in some cases, to reach points of no return. Until today, every citizen still needs to find opportunities to feed their kids, pay taxes, bills, rents, etc.
Not all societies are like European ones where they have laws that protect them. In Latin America, for example, the employers would force their employees to give their knowledge and being fired after it without any alternatives.
Additionally, unbelievable numbers of people live in Latin America from informal employments reaching frightful levels as high as 56% in El Salvador in 2016 (11). This situation could lead to bigger problems, for instance, increase their crime rates (12).
3. Massive movements of people.
Recently, massive groups of people from the Middle East, Africa and Central America have been moving to more developed nations in order to increase their standards of living, giving better opportunities to their families and getting new jobs (13).
These situations could become more frequent if no re-skilling happens when too many processes were automated; since the lack of proper laws, cultural differences, among other reasons might impact negatively in their ways of living and forcing them to relocate, creating new economic migrants.
As you could have read the RPAs are capable of providing you great opportunities and benefits to your organizations, but at the same time, they could create certain risks to take into consideration before implementing them. The key in my opinion to successful automations reside in three important points (ARE):
- Awareness.
- Re-skilling.
- Embracing Changes.
I encourage you to go deeper into these emerging technologies and use them wisely to your own profit, analyze their pros and cons and understand: What, Where, When and How you can automate responsibly in your organization.
If you would like to add something else, feel free to share your thoughts and questions in the comment section below.
Originally published in LinkedIn.
Bibliography.
- The Most and Least Meaningful Jobs (Feb 2019).
- 21 Future Jobs the Robots Are Actually Creating (Dec 2017).
- Computer Programmer (Feb 2019).
- Introverts take note: 9 jobs for people who don’t like people (Oct 2017).
- What is Programming Logic? (Feb 2019)
- Robotic Enterprise Framework (Feb 2019).
- Center of Excellence (Feb 2019).
- The Four Faces of Automation (Feb 2019).
- World population living in extreme poverty, 1820-2015 (Mar 2019).
- McKinsey – the digital skills gap will get worse as cognitive automation intensifies (Jun 2018).
- El 56% de los trabajadores en El Salvador están en el sector informal (Sep 2017) (Spanish only).
- There’s a cure for Latin America’s murder epidemic – and it doesn’t involve more police or prisons (Apr 2017).
- Migrant caravan clashes with Mexican police, waits on bridge at Guatemalan-Mexican border (Oct 2018).
